Staying on Track with Predictive Analysis

Alan Brown, Digital Transformation Advisor at Digital.ai, conducts a series of interviews with various members of the organization. In the third and final conversation in the series, Alan virtually sits down with Dan Berg, Chief Architect at Digital.ai, to speak on the evolution of the Digital.ai Platform, building the foundation for digital transformation, and how other organizations can benefit from an integrated experience. 

With digital transformation becoming essential, companies expect services from their providers to be delivered to them fast and effectively. Adopting digital technologies in order to drive value within an organization will be the beginning of a successful digital transformation for many. As businesses evolve, the software used by them will evolve in tandem, allowing for users to properly leverage all its capabilities to their advantage. 

Such a goal is what Dan Berg, Chief Architect at Digital.ai, aims to achieve. Berg’s primary responsibility is to advance the technical architecture across Digital.ai and its suite of capabilities. Specifically, he drives the creation and evolution of what is called the Digital.ai Platform. The platform helps create a fundamental digital experience for Digital.ai customers. This includes users managing their content, tracking customer journeys, and delivering targeted content, allowing the users to provide a more personalized and consistent experience. 

As Berg has advanced in his career, he has moved away from building packaged software, to SaaS and cloud offerings instead. Doing so has allowed him the opportunity to react to customer pain and provide rapid changes. Compared to the previous turnaround time of up to a quarter, a SaaS offering allows for a fix to be completed in hours, or even minutes in certain cases. Given the issue, developers can turn it around and return it to the customer in their production operation to provide the feedback directly to the development teams to make improvements. 

After seeing what the future of digital transformation is capable of, Berg had a shift in his perception of how to provide digital experiences to Digital.ai customers and began using it himself. 

“The direction I want to take the company in is to move more and more of our capabilities into a SaaS-based delivery process so that we can deliver fast, reliable services to help our customers adopt digital technologies and use digital transformations to drive value into their organization,” Berg states. “So, my goal is to make it as easy as possible to use our capabilities, get access to our capabilities, and use those capabilities to drive value in their organization.” 

Building the foundation 

As Digital.ai continues down the path of their own digital transformation, they are simultaneously helping other organizations begin their own digital journey. 

With the assistance of Digital.ai capabilities, specifically with DevOps software delivery, you can incorporate more AI functionality. Organizations can now take advantage of predictive results and analysis about how they deliver software and continue to improve on those experiences. 

At the same time, Berg is working on Digital.ai’s platform services, which is the foundation that ensures the experience is more unified. As the foundation, it is essential that the platform is continuously enhanced. Doing so allows for a better-integrated experience, drives more value, and infuses more of Digital.ai’s AI capabilities deeper into its stack of existing offerings. It will also incorporate other third parties as well, so that Digital.ai can surround and provide value against the suite of tools being used. 

“It’s easier to stand up, it’s easier to gain access, and it’s easier to upgrade over time. It’s like building a house, right?” asks Berg. “You can’t start by working on the roof. You need to have the bedrock and the foundation of your house already built so that you can build new functionality on top of it.” 

Fast and furious decision making 

As organizations begin utilizing more of Digital.ai’s capabilities, Berg hopes they will be provided with greater visibility and a faster delivery rate.  

Having clear visibility of where you’re going and what you’re delivering on is a necessity for organizations to move quickly. Berg compares it to driving in a race car, implying that developers must remain on the correct track in order to move at the velocity that is required. 

The capabilities provided by Digital.ai will define the collected data, allowing for businesses to stay inside the “track” that is in front of them, as well as start predicting where the track will be going in the future. 

“At the end of the day, I tell people this: When you’re involved in software delivery, you have to make decisions quickly. Failure to make decisions is stagnation; you won’t get anywhere,” Berg states. “Now, you might make some wrong decisions. But if you make them quickly, you can receive feedback promptly, so that you can react to and correct a potential wrong choice.” 

The predictive analysis offered by Digital.ai also helps organizations avoid poor decision making upfront, without needing to wait for any type of feedback. Utilizing all of these integrated capabilities together will keep a business moving quickly in an effective way that never stops delivering value to their customers. 

Making a difference 

Looking toward the future, Berg is hopeful that innovation and change will continue to thrive in the technology industry. Specifically, Berg and his team are looking to improve the ability to drive automation across multiple different tools, interacting with each other, without having to complete detailed configurations or make changes to individual products. 

“More and more, [Digital.ai] is focused on how we can change and innovate in ways that improve the ability for us to predict activities that drive value to customers through business outcomes,” Berg says. “And what I believe we’re going to see as we start looking further out, is that data is going to be incredibly important here.” 

Data-driven predictions 

Consuming and ingesting large amounts of data, analyzing it, and then making the necessary predictions is what Berg considers to be the future of delivering value to customers. The more information you have, the better equipped an organization is to manage and reduce risk. 

However, Berg contemplates that it is impossible to model out every aspect and relationship to determine what activity developers are doing. Developers can attempt to monitor predictions through data definitions and relational models, but at the end of the day, it is artificial intelligence that will properly track these predictions. 

“It’s going to be machine models that will interpret large amounts of data, to make those predictions and correlate activities to outcomes,” Berg claims. “Which activities should you invest in? Which one should you de-invest in? Which one should you prioritize?” 

Although that question has yet to be answered, the goal is to break it down over time. Ideally in the future, making predictions will be made simple to customers thanks to the innovation of AIOps. 

Learn more about making the most your AIOps in our webinar: “How to achieve resilient & high velocity IT operations through AI-powered analytics”